Like many aspiring Hollywood screenwriters, now prolific writer-producer-director Judd Apatow began by penning spec scripts (unsolicited screenplays that the scribe hopes to sell or use as a sample to get agents and work).
Before he became the executive producer on television’s Freaks and Geeks or catapulted Steve Carell onto the world stage with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Apatow wrote a spec for one of his favorite shows: The Simpsons.
Specs are rarely purchased and make it to air. What is even more unheard of is a spec being purchased 22-years after it was written. But EW reports that in a recent conversation with Conan O’Brien on the web series Serious Jibber-Jabber, Apatow told the ginger talk show host/former Simpsons writer that the show’s producers had approached him about the spec after they heard him discuss it publicly.
Apatow wrote the script (in which “Homer is hypnotized into thinking that he’s 10-years-old again and winds up as best friends with Bart”) during the early days of the series. When Simpsons executive producer Al Jean heard Apatow discuss the concept at a screening of the director’s upcoming comedy This is 40 he thought, ‘Well, we’re always looking for good shows and good writers.’”
“I sent word to him: ‘If you’re interested, we’ll buy it,’” Jean says. “I think he had to find it — it was in one of his boxes.”
The Simpsons producer offers the following advice to aspiring writers:
“For people who want to know how to write a freelance Simpsons episode: Just do it, then have a megamilliondollar movie career and we’ll buy the spec.”
He, jokingly, says he’d be happy to take Apatow on in a staff position as well…if this episode works out. “And Conan can come back anytime he wants,” Jean adds.
Apatow’s The Simpsons episode will air next season.
Source : ign[dot]com
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